Gardening Questions - Since Some Ask. Creating the Fungal Jungle with Straw Bales

I consider tomatoes to be weeds with tasty berries.
I do not build supports or put up wire cages.

How do you get rid of persistent weeds?

Weed killer is not as effective as they make people think, and many have grave doubts about spraying it all over like a garden hose. I would use RoundUp or Dawn detergent on poison ivy, but not anywhere else.

Broadleaf weeds are easily quashed with repeated mowing. They cannot go to seed and their mulch helps the grass grow.

Weeds in the low spots of sidewalks? If the soil has built up, shovel the weeds and soil out together and use the combination as compost or mulch.

Weeds in the narrow cracks in a stone walk or a sidewalk? Apply salt, whether table salt or rock salt. In a saline solution, it will dry up the plant and be persistent in stopping growth without being necessarily toxic. The salt can be diluted later with water and will be from rain and watering.

A salt water solution is going to dry up the plant roots. You could do the same with a whole bag of dry, inorganic fertilizer, but that would go right down into the water table. My uncle burnt his wife's roses by double applying fertilizer. Water would have helped. His intentions were good.

Irony - roses grow best without fertilizer. If you love roses, cover the ground between them with a layer of newspapers, about 1/2 inch thick, with mulch over the newspapers. I water the newspapers first to keep them down while the mulch is piled on. Mulch prevents weeds, composts the lawn for a wonderful soil environment, and turns all covered weeds into compost. Mulch holds water and prevents wind and water erosion.

Straw bales can grow flowers or vines from the sides, too.

Which side is up with straw bale gardening? Creating the Fungal Jungle

Straw bales are placed with the strings on the outside, facing the gardener, although any configuration will work. The straw side up on top makes planting a little easier. For you city slickers, that is like looking into the top of  a box of soda straws. The other side of the bale looks relatively mangled, but it will work too.

I got mine going early before our last snow and the rain that followed. Every so often I watered with a soaker hose too, keeping the straw damp, like a wet rag wrung out.

The straw becomes a composting medium where soil creatures and plant roots can meet and make deals, carbon and root exudates (for fungi and microbes) in exchange for whatever the plant needs. The fungi can travel far for the food, if it gets the carbon it cannot manufacture on its own. Thus the straw bale becomes a fungal jungle beneficial for all plants.

Hydroponic gardening is another version of this, producing tasteless tomatoes. As some wit said, a hothouse tomato is the fourth state of water - liquid, steam, solid, and tomato.

The difference is the microbial activity--in soil and straw bales--rather than counting on water and chemicals to do the job in hydroponics.

Every get a dozen roses at the store, only to see them wilt in 24 hours? They are produced for show rather than for long term health. Of course, shipping and neglect shorten their lives too. The ones we bought for Easter were extra fresh and lasted most of the week, given away to three neighbors while we kept some. They were given in memory of Gary Meyer.

The soil, an ocean of life,
does not need a rototiller hurricane to stir it up.

Biggest Mistakes of Gardeners

Beginners are a too timid. They should experiment more, observe more, order more and plant more. To lose one plant is crushing, but that will happen every season. If it is one plant or one variety that crashes, the abundance of the rest make up for the human mistakes or the inclement weather.

Gardeners should water more after planting. They should save as much rainwater as they can and use it on their favorite plants. Rather than buying a capture kit for way too much money, I bought two Rubbermaid garbage cans, each lid converted into a birdbath top.

Gardeners should prune roses and bushes and trees. Roses and bushes grow and have better shapes with pruning. Trees need more light and air.

Gardeners should stop using poisons. Instead, they should welcome a wide variety of God's creatures to do His work, as planned from the beginning. Has anyone ever said, "In the beginning, Monsanto...."?

Finally, everyone who grows anything in a yard should keep the organic matter there and let the soil creatures, birds, and toads do their work.

 This is the Dick, Jane, and Sally version.

Middle school version -
the truth is incredibly complex
with infinite dependencies.

St. John Lutheran Church (formerly WELS) - Story on WELS Discussions

"So my guys stole the congregation and its endowment,
and no one said a word...except that blogger I never
met but invited to speak at St. Marcus."

The late Tim Niedfelt wrote about the theft.

Basic Facts Here - About the Theft of St. John's in Milwaukee via the Jeske Mob

WELS Discussions

Paul Birsching

7 hrs

When I was quietly left out of the ministry after two years, I had just been through two of the toughest years of my life. I was young, and I figured I had made a lot of mistakes. I was asked to sit out a year, and, for my own health, I did. That I was never spoken to again is another story. After two years or service, I had hardly proven myself.

But there are many, many others out there with proven track records and 25 or 30 years of service, who have also been summarily dismissed from the WELS consciousness. These people labored long and faithfully, often with little encouragement and less compensation, and received not the rewards to which the laborer is entitled. What they did receive was nothing, absolutely nothing, no explanations, not compensations, no thanks for service rendered, only a cold shoulder.

For 27 years now, I have watched while others much more approved for ministry and arguably much more talented and faithful than I have receive ghastly treatment with no so much as a raised eyebrow. And yet, we now wonder why we can't seem to find enough qualified candidates to be pastors in the WELS.

In 1996, St. John's Congregation, Vliet Street, Milwaukee, one of the very earliest and most historically significant churches of the WELS, voted to leave the WELS. Kevin Hastings, then ten years into his ministry, decided to stay with the church and soldier on, often taking half his meager salary and even more often putting his own hands to do the repair work necessary to keep the doors open for worship. Kevin, unfortunately, was sent to a doomed congregation of aging members who could not attract younger members. Because of unfortunately liberal politics that surrounded St. John's with housing projects that served to surround the church with transients of a decidedly Southern Baptist bent, all efforts to grow St. John's from the community were fruitless.

I'm not here to tell you that St. John's deserved the WELS to step in and save it in some way. I do think that the fact of its leaving the WELS received not even a mention speaks to how the WELS is ready to forsake all things old in search of the new. Perhaps this explains why the WELS loses people out the back door faster than they can get them in through the front door.

What I am decided needs to be addressed, however, is how Kevin Hastings, faithful servant of God, deserved to be curtly dismissed of his duties via letter, deprived of his personal effects, and how certain WELS pastors could have been complicit in this matter. I would especially like to know how these pastors were involved when they don't even reside, in some cases, within 400 miles of Milwaukee. And I finally would like to know why WELS pastors and other members have been applauding a former WELS pastor, turn ELCA pastor, taking over the church which is now lead by openly gay men.

There is certainly a time to say nothing to besmirch the character of certain people which would break the eighth commandment. But, in this case, the character of the person with no fault, Kevin, had been besmirched, while those openly living in sin have been applauded.

There is a growing undercurrent of mistrust and disgust with things happening in the WELS and being swept under the table. We had better start addressing these wrongs, making confessions where applicable, and making serious attempts at rectifying them, because the volcano of unspoken unrest is about to explode. The time to be silent on such things is no more.

• 

  Steven E. Anderson "And I finally would like to know why WELS pastors and other members have been applauding a former WELS pastor, turn ELCA pastor, taking over the church which is now lead by openly gay men."
  
  I don't quite understand the connection between WELS and ELCA. Who is supporting homosexual leadership in which synod and church?

  7 hrs · Like
• 

  Paul Birsching St. Johns dwindled to a very few members. At some point, the leadership came out. Shortly thereafter they issued a dismissal by letter to Pastor Hastings. After this, they invited a former WELS pastor who, for various reasons, became ELCA. Since he...See More

  7 hrs · Like
• 

  Paul Birsching And the new pastor has personally slandered both Pastor Hastings and former Pastor Brenner to me with absolute lies.

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  Paul Birsching I'm sure that there are a lot of financial factors that are different today, Paul A. And I'm also sure that we lack the faith of our forebears, mostly because the media plays upon our fears and we listen. But fear had nothing to do with this particular instance. Nor did economics. If Kevin hadn't bent over backwards to keep the church going, it would have failed a long time ago. No, this was a dastardly deed, one which defies explanation. And, again, I'm not saying it was a good situation in any sense, but the WAY in which this was done and the WAY everyone looked the other way are quite disturbing. And also the way that so many have been duped into thinking that all is now well. A lot of people spend a lot of time talking hypothetically. Here is a real live case, and none of the hypothetical champions for the truth ever became real ones. Where are the dogmaticians on this one?

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The altar at Historic St. John, 8th and Vliet, Milwaukee.

***

GJ - I knew this was coming, about six months in advance, when Pastor Kevin Hastings told me this - His friend, one of the WELS pastor, told him to have an exit strategy. I advised him that WELS was going to steal the congregation. He should get an attorney pronto.

Hastings did not act until after the congregation was stolen and the two men had him locked out, with their hands on the endowment, one in the parsonage, his personal belongings stolen for the time being. Got a problem with this? Talk to our law firm.

The episode reminded me of the Menendez brothers, who shotgunned their parents to death and used the estate cash to pay for their criminal defense.

One WELS laymen wrote me lately that my blogging about this shameful episode  is the only record of anything happening.

The account above is another perspective, from someone I do not know and with whom I have had no contact.

Synod President Mark Schroeder did nothing and said nothing, as far as anyone can tell.

Mark Jeske has organized many Thrivent events, starring Mark Jeske, sharing the limelight with ELCA pastors. He is also on the board of Thrivent, so he has no qualms about financing abortion on demand through Planned Parenthood grants, no compunction about ELCA's pansexual views on ordination.

No one in the Synodical Conference should be shocked, because this is exactly how CFW Walther got his start in the papacy. Instead of meeting with Bishop Stephan about the man's adultery and syphilis, Walther organized a mob of his supporters only, came down to Perryville, threatened Stephan's life, robbed him of his gold, land, and books, and kidnapped him at gunpoint, forcing him over to Illinois. The Perryville-St. Louis mob profited greatly from these criminal acts, covered them up, and wrote themselves up as heroes.

Following In His Steps - not Jesus, but the Great Walther.